CapitalistImperialistPig

Oddly enough, the word axes is reputed to be the only word in English which is the plural of three different English words: ax, axe, and axis. Though I think that it's a stretch to consider ax and axe as different words. Ax and Axis both trace back to Proto-Indo-European words that sounded similar and had their modern meanings, but I'm not sure if they were related. So far as I know, the dwarvish 'Baruk' (Axes) is not related to the Hebrew 'Baruch', בָּרוּךְ, (blessed), which is related to the semitic word knee.

And as imagination bodies forth  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing  A local habitation and a name.  .................Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Scene 1 Watching dust, dirt, leaves and tumbleweeds roll past the other evening, I recalled that our local winds blow rather consistently from the Southwest. The average wind over the country is from the West. How long, I wondered, will it take for the whole West Coast to blow all the way to the East Coast? Quite a while, I guess. It's dry here, so dust and sand blow a lot. A whole big field of gypsum dunes (White Sands National Monument) covers many squares miles of Otero County, all evaporites blown off a tiny lake. Much of the country isn't much like that. Even here most of the blown matter is biological: leaves, pollen, tumbleweeds, and bugs. That biological matter is indeed a sort of "airy nothing," composed almost entirely of elemen...